


Familiar - Widojest oneshot

by whatkindofnameisella



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Pining, apology, caleb and jester dance, huperdook, i... really dont know how to tag this, just some fun pining in mundane conversation, you know like how liam likes to do to us every damn episode
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-25
Updated: 2019-08-25
Packaged: 2020-09-26 17:35:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20393536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whatkindofnameisella/pseuds/whatkindofnameisella
Summary: One night, on the Nein's way down to the Menagerie Coast, Caleb feels compelled to apologize for an old slip up amid his mixed feelings. Maybe if he just apologizes this feeling will stop clanging around his chest and he can ignore the way being with Jester somehow feels... familiar.





	Familiar - Widojest oneshot

Caleb sat next to Jester underneath the dome. It was the fifth night of their journey down to the Menagerie coast and they had both called first watch. The sound of heavy breathing punctuated the silence between the scratches of Jester’s pencil against her journal and tiny giggles to herself. Caleb decided not to be too outraged at her blatant lack of dedication to the job of watching for danger, since it seemed like a relatively peaceful night. The moon shone bright against the tall grass and sparse trees, the sky clear of clouds and the stars plentiful. From the movement of the grass Caleb guessed that if the dome weren’t up a light breeze would be shuffling the pages of Jester’s journal and ruffling the hair of them both.  
  
Caleb crossed his arms over his chest and peered out into the field, ignoring the nagging thoughts clamoring around his brain. He’d been wanting to mention something to Jester for weeks, but it never quite felt like the right time anymore. He felt childish and selfish drawing attention to himself only to do something as small as apologize for being drunk when they had lost so much recently. Any time he would walk to her room at the Leaky Tap or find a moment alone with her on the road he would think about unlatching their chains or stopping by a roadside grave or everything they’d had done to them over the past few weeks and find himself stopping just before the words could come out.  
  
But in the times in between stopping himself from speaking to her it just felt like a wad of guilt was growing, ever-present, in his chest. And his nagging thoughts wouldn’t leave him alone.  
  
But here they were. Just the two of them awake. Jester giggling into her journal and him keeping a keen watch and a comfortable silence stretched between them. Barely half their watch had passed.  
  
The wad weighed heavy in his chest.  
  
“Hey, Jester.”  
  
“Ya?” She didn’t lift her head from her journal as she answered him.  
  
He brought a hand up and ran it over the bottom half of his face, scratching the unchecked facial hair growing down his neck. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something.” He swallowed hard, the act of speaking even those few words setting loose a batch of butterflies inside his stomach and chest. He cleared his throat against the feeling.  
  
He watched as Jester carefully placed her pencil in between the pages of her journal, snapped the worn book shut, and twisted her head to look at him over one shoulder, the ends of her messy bob bouncing, an eyebrow raised and a quirk to her lips, “What is it? Is it a secret?” She placed the journal to one side, span a quarter turn on the ground towards him, and leaned her weight on one arm. “If it is you _have_ to tell me,” her voice dipped in a familiar playful manner and a cheeky grin was now in full bloom on her face. In the dim night light her skin seemed a much richer blue than it did in the day, her bob turning the shade of a deep navy velvet. Her upturned cheek was highlighted with silver moonlight and her violet eyes refracted it like crystals. It was almost scary the way she divulged her full attention to him when they talked one on one. Jester had the uncanny ability to make him feel stripped bare when he was with her.  
  
“I… erm…” Caleb ran a hand along his facial hair again, his hand finding a resting place on his chin, “I wanted to apologize.”  
  
Jester knit her brow together and dipped her head forward, pursing her lips, “What do you mean, apologize? What do you have to apologize for?”  
  
“Well, it seems kind of pointless by now but… Huperdook.”  
  
He saw her face drop the tension, heard her change of voice, “_Caleb_. You don’t have to apologize. There’s nothing for you to apologize for—“  
  
“But— there is!” He looked down and knotted his fingers together, swallowed before looking back up again. “We were dancing, and having fun, and then I called you… I called you—“  
  
“Astrid, ya.” She took her weight of her arm and sat with her back hunched, a _no duh_ look on her face, “I don’t care, Caleb. You were super drunk. That was weeks ago.”  
  
“Ja, but…” Caleb sighed, staring into her and searching for the right words. He thought back to waltzing with her, stupid drunk and barely able to stay on beat. The room had seemed abuzz with talking and laughter and her strong grasp leading him out onto the dance floor had felt uncommonly warm. He stumbled along as the music started up, her leading him after a few measures, and when he twirled under her arm and stumbled back into her grip she had laughed and everything in the room seemed to get a little brighter. She looked up at him and amidst her smile and his drunk stupor and the baffling way his heart seemed to be fluttering around his chest he found himself in a dancehall in Rexentrumm and seventeen and smitten all over again.  
  
But Jester wasn’t Astrid. She was blue and fiery and buff and innocent and way too impulsive for her own good. She was inappropriately timed jokes and paint splatters along arms and mischief and chaos just for the hell of it. Jester was original and beautiful and something that he had never come across before.  
  
Yet sometimes when she leaned in to talk to him or he felt her fingers carding through his hair as he looked through Frumpkin’s eyes, he felt a sense of familiarity course through him that he couldn’t put a name to, almost like… like…  
  
Well, like he had reunited with a piece of home again.  
  
The sound of the rest of the party shifting in their sleep punctuated the silence of his thoughts. “What, Caleb? But what?”  
  
Caleb sighed exasperatedly, bringing himself to look at her instead of through her, “It was dickish of me. To call you by the name of someone who you don’t know and isn’t with me anymore.” She looked right back and he found himself scared to know what she would answer.  
  
Jester cocked her head to one side, her eyebrows drawing up into a disapproving line. “You’re always so melancholy, Caleb,” she leaned over to nudge his shoulder, rocking his upper body a bit, “Stop looking for things to apologize for. I had fun with you anyways. Huperdook is in the past, stop worrying.”  
  
“Ja, but… Jester, I…” He blinked hard a few times and pressed his lips together, mulling over his jumbled thoughts, “I really wish I hadn’t said that. I really wish… I wish we could’ve kept dancing. Because… I…” A memory tugged at the back of Caleb’s heart – waltz music and the firm grip of the tiefling sitting before him and a feeling of joy that he had long forgotten resurfaced. He tried to bring himself to say the truth. “Because I enjoyed dancing with you.”  
  
Such a mundane confession. Yet he felt short on oxygen and like his pulse was stuttering through his veins and like he was carving out a piece of his heart and giving it to her.  
  
Jester smiled in a rare way he had come to know – pure and soft and not trying to hide anything behind it. It made a seed of warmth blossom inside his chest. “I enjoyed dancing with you too, Caleb.” She leaned forward and squeezed his shoulder. “And… Caleb, of course I forgive you. I was never mad at you in the first place.” She looked slightly up at him and he thought he saw a more complex emotion behind her eyes.  
  
Jester pulled her hand back to lean her weight on her arm, and immediately Caleb felt the absence of her touch. She twisted the sides of her mouth, seemingly unable to wipe a smile from her face. Reaching up and tucking a piece of hair behind her ear, Jester looked up at the sky. The moonlight made her skin shimmer like satin, made her eyes look like pools of stars.  
  
“Maybe we can dance again, sometime.”  
  
Looking at Jester, feeling his pulse skip from one beat to the next, Caleb thought of all the other things he could say he enjoyed about her. He could say that he enjoyed her uncanny way of making him laugh when he least wanted to, or her excitement to jump at any chance to do something phenomenal. He could say that he delighted in watching her rearrange the shelves of every shop they went in to, or that he didn’t totally mind finding stupid drawings in the margins of his spellbook. He could say that he had reveled in seeing her alive in Shady Creek run and that the moment she started joking about being in chains to make them all worry less he knew she was stronger than any other person he would ever know.  
  
Caleb could say that when she smiled at him or casually touched him when he wasn’t expecting it his heart had come to do unwelcome somersaults around his ribcage. He could say that her laugh was brighter than a daylight spell and it terrified him that he felt that way. He could say that he was ashamed of the way a knife twisted in his gut when he saw her longingly look at Fjord or obviously pine for him. Or Caleb could say that he was broken and fragile and so far from what she deserved, but the way that he felt drawn to her was familiar and being around her made him feel stripped bare and innocent and new to the world again.  
  
Caleb looked at her bathing in the starlight and wished he knew how to keep those emotions at bay. He let the faintest smile quirk his lips.  
  
“Ja. Maybe we can.”

**Author's Note:**

> thank you all for reading! I haven't written in a while but I felt very compelled to write this as widojest is starting to take over my every waking daydream. this was kinda based off of a reply to comment I saw on episode 25 that was like, "maybe one of the reasons caleb called jester by Astrid's name was because he found something similar to his young love in dancing with her" and I have not been able to get it out of my head since. i'm super excited to write more about this disaster wizard and harbinger of chaos that makes him feel happy, thanks again for reading :^)


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